Fiducial Marker Approach for Biomechanical Smartphone-Based Measurements

Abstract

Marker-based measurement has been used to assess human body positioning, but human marker tracking has yet to make the transition from the laboratory to personal computing devices, such as smartphones. A novel smartphone-based approach could use a fiducial marker system. Fiducial markers are applicable to augmented reality, robotics, and other applications where a camera-object pose is required and tracked. However, few fiducial systems can be implemented on a mobile phone because of the processing requirements for identifying and tracking the tags in realtime. In augmented reality, virtual information is shared with the real world to further enhance a person’s view of the environment; therefore, this illusion is directly associated with good registration of both virtual and real worlds. Measurement applications also require accurate and fast registration so that real objects are in alignment with virtual objects in real-time. Our research reviewed and evaluated various fiducial marker systems by developing an Android mobile application for real-time biomechanical measurement. A test was designed for two nominated fiducial systems to compare their speed and robustness on the mobile phone. AprilTag2 was selected as the best fiducial marker option for this application.